The Snapdragon X Elite has finally arrived, and with it, Windows laptops that could challenge the MacBook in areas where it falls well short. After spending a day with Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop, I’m excited about this new future.
I’ve been a Windows user all my life. For the most part, I’ve never been interested in macOS. And every time I used it, I just didn’t like it more. It was death by a thousand cuts, really. But there was one thing I just couldn’t ignore. Apple has absolutely nailed it with some of the most important parts of a laptop, namely battery life. The move to Apple Silicon made MacBooks more appealing than ever, to the point where I finally gave up on trying to stick with Windows and bought a MacBook Air out of sheer frustration.
But then came the Snapdragon X Elite.
Qualcomm announced its new Windows chipset last year big promises. This was against the promise of Windows on Arm for years, which fell incredibly short. Poor app support, underwhelming performance, and crude emulation resulted in experiences that weren’t worth anyone’s time. But the Snapdragon X Elite looked promising from day one and continued to impress until the final hardware announcement.
That’s why I was so excited to try the Microsoft Surface Laptop after a few months of experimentation and get rid of my MacBook Air. And after just one day, I’m quite happy.
Starting with the physical hardware, the latest Surface Laptop is a stellar machine. The aluminum body is just the right thin and looks great in the ‘Platinum’ trim I bought – blue is obviously the best choice, but I’m going for it anyway. The keyboard, haptic touchpad and screen are excellent. The keys have plenty of travel, Microsoft’s first haptic touchpad is easily as good as the one in the MacBook Air I’ve used before, and the screen is bright. The 13.8-inch size is also perfect for travel, which was my primary focus, and I’m always happy to have plenty of ports.
But there are obviously two key things we all want to know about. Battery life and performance.
Since I’ve only been using this machine for a little over a day, I can only draw so many conclusions about both. But after a full day’s work, I’m impressed on both accounts. From about 9:30am to 6:30pm, with the laptop active most of the time, the battery dropped from 100% to 24%. This is excellent considering I wasn’t just watching videos, I was working with dozens of Chrome, WordPress and Photoshop tabs all day.
And in that regard, the performance held up really well throughout.
I didn’t get a single slowdown in anything I did during the day. Photoshop held up like a champ, which wasn’t much of a surprise considering it’s a native Arm application. Almost all the apps I run are also native, including Chrome and Slack. The only ones I’ve come across that aren’t native yet are Beeper, Lightroom Classic, and Steam. Steam and Beeper also ran in the background most of the day. The performance of emulated apps is predictably not as good as the native ones, but it’s not a deal breaker. Lightroom Classic was my big fear here, but it worked flawlessly. I was able to easily edit photos and export them and would never know I was using an emulated app.
So far, I am extremely satisfied with the Surface Laptop. It’s the machine I’ve been waiting years for. I’ll be using it more in the coming weeks and put together a full review, but in the meantime, what else would you like to know? Comment below with something you’d like me to test or a question you have and I’ll see what I can do.
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